


Kind Men

by quigonejinn



Category: Captain America (2011), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Id Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-22
Updated: 2012-07-22
Packaged: 2017-11-10 12:03:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/466063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>D/s-ish-verse retelling of Captain America: The First Avenger.  <i>When the time comes, Erskine doesn't throw a grenade onto the training ground.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Kind Men

**Author's Note:**

> Are you familiar with the term id fic? You know, fic that gets written to satisfy the author's animal brain rather than the parts said brain that deal with rational sense and plot and characterization and good taste? Yeah, this is id fic by somebody who has _no qualms_ whatsoever about posting fic in which Obadiah Stane trolls Pepper Potts into beating a sex worker bloody. And yet, I'm more than a little embarrassed about this. 
> 
> This is D/s-ish-verse Captain America: TFA with so, so, so much angst and noncon and dubcon sex and sex that is performative right up until the shitty, awful moment when it isn't and Steve and Peggy and Bucky feels in a sustained, full-throated soap opera arias. See notes at the end of the fic for acknowledgement of how this fic ignores not just the big elephant in the room of HOW THE FUCK YOU TELL TOPS/BOTTOMS FROM JUST LOOKING AT THEM, but a whole herd of other elephants involving, like, everything. 
> 
> You're warned. This also fails to incorporate the information from the character dossiers that appear in the deleted scene in Avengers.

Steve tries to keep fear from his face, but it doesn't matter. 

Plenty of people heard, and it's too late to take the words back. The hand on the back of his neck is strong, and Steve smells liquor on the man. Sweat. Cigarettes. A little aftershave. Cheap varieties of both. He gets dragged outside so fast that he bangs his knee against the door to the theater and is limping before they're on the pavement, and outside, the sky is overcast, but not raining, which is a small mercy. The street is busy, so the man pulls him into an alley. Second small mercy, Steve thinks as he is thrown against the wall. The man uses his fists, which Steve decides might be a third small mercy. Maybe. 

There is a lot of force and a lot of grunting, but not much method or any technique besides knocking Steve around. It means more damage to the face and whatever Steve uses to break his fall, but less humiliation. Steve fights back as much as he can; the man seems surprised that Steve would try. He hits Steve extra for it and says so; when Steve picks up the trash can lid and tries to fend him off, the man looks honestly confused. 

He yanks it out of Steve's hands and hits him so hard in the face that the world dissolves for a second. When Steve's brain works again, he's s in the corner. 

Blood runs from his nose over his mouth; Steve struggles to get to his knees, but can't manage to stand. 

"Mouthy," the man says. "You collared?" 

He glances at Steve's throat, and just to double-check, just in case Steve might work in a setting where collars have gone out of fashion, he turns Steve's right hand over so that the wrist is turned up. It's pale and unmarked. The man snorts. "No, can't imagine who would want one with an attitude like yours."

Steve braces himself for the sound of the man unzipping of pants, for his mouth to be forced open. He is dizzy and suspects he might have a concussion, but he tries to keep his breathing slow and steady, tries to see whether he can get his legs to obey orders, maybe he can get his elbow up in the guy's -- 

Bucky comes strolling in and suggests the guy pick on somebody his own size. 

*

It's 1943. Tripoli falls in January to the Allied forces under Montgomery, and the Japanese give up on Papua. In February, the Russians chase the Nazis out of Stalingrad. In the darkest days of 1941, there was some talk of having submissives take a more active role in the American military, but the tide of war turned before it became more. A Texas socialite led the drive to form an auxiliary for submissives; they were welcome in home defense units and could serve as air raid wardens, but they were more needed in the factory, office, and home. Tocqueville wrote that the domestic influence and mores of the American submissive were great general causes for the maintenance of the democratic republic. Generations of American school students were assigned essays on it. 

Steve went to school when he was able to attend because of ill health. Bucky, on the other hand, spent more time cutting classes than in them. 

Steve's identity card says that he is a submissive. Bucky's doesn't. 

"There has got to be better way for you to get laid," Bucky says, holding a handkerchief out. 

Steve looks at the handkerchief and chooses to wipe his bloody nose on the back of his hand instead. "It isn't always about sex." 

Bucky is looking at him, a half smile on his face. Steve can taste blood in his mouth. He spits and lets himself sound bitter and angry. "Even for a submissive." 

Bucky smiles with his full mouth, but doesn't say anything. He has mostly given up reminding Steve that it's _illegal_ to lie about your enlistment form. Mostly. 

At least he doesn't try to put his arm around Steve's shoulders. 

*

They go to the Expo. Bucky has a brunette, and he sets Steve up with a pretty blonde dominant he knows, and he tells Steve that she'd be perfect for him. When Steve meets her, from the disappointed expression on her face, he knows exactly how Bucky sold her on going on this date. 

_My friend,_ Bucky would have said. _Sweet as you want. Won't kick up a fuss about the rough stuff, especially from a girl._

Steve's date decides she would rather try her chances of sharing with Bucky, and Steve slips away to the recruitment center, where he meets Erskine. 

"We'll go dancing, I promise," Bucky says to the blonde, winking at her to show that he'll make it up to her later, and goes after Steve. 

* 

Abraham Erskine is a smart man. He hears Steve and Bucky arguing with each other outside the recruitment center. Bucky points out to him that they could catch him. Worse, they'd take him. What does he think is going to happen to him in with -- Steve says that there are men and women laying down their lives. He has no right to do anything less than them. It isn't about him. Bucky snorts. He looks at Steve, small and blond, sharp-nosed with the mobile mouth underneath. He has at least a head of height on Steve and maybe forty, fifty pounds. 

"And you got nothing to prove."

Steve doesn't even bother to blush. 

When the time comes, Erskine doesn't throw a grenade onto the training ground. Phillips would expect the only submissive under consideration to throw himself or herself on top of it. 

Instead, he makes sure Phillips is on a hill overlooking the route where the trainees are running under the eye of the drill sergeant. They watch Steve get the flag down, hand it to the drill sergeant, then climb into the Jeep, cool, calm, completely unflustered, though out of breath. 

*

Steve grows up mostly without his father, who died a few years after the Great War. Complications from mustard gas, weakened lungs. Bad episodes with good times in between -- times were good in general. America came out of the war roaring, and there were opportunities for an educated dominant with a university degree, who could talk to anyone and set them at ease. Steve has a memory of being laid up with an asthma attack, and his father coming to sit by his bed and tell him funny stories about living in the trenches, at least until Steve started laughing. The asthma didn't leave him enough air to laugh, so Joseph changed the topic and told another story: a yellow-brown gas that stole breath and strength away. 

One morning, when he was in the trenches, he looked up over the top of the trench with Frenchie on his left and Skinner on his right, and they saw the yellow-brown gas rolling across the field toward them. 

"What happened?" Steve murmured. 

His father considered, then said, just as quietly, "We put our masks on. Frenchie had his mask, and I helped Skinner put his on." 

"Nobody was hurt?"

"Everybody was fine."

Steve considered this. "Is the gas what happened to me? I don't remember anything about it." 

For an answer, his father kissed Steve on the forehead, then sat by Steve, holding his hand until he fell asleep and the breathing came slow and deep. 

A kind man. 

"Come to bed," Sarah said from the doorway. 

Six months later, Joseph was dead. 

*

Steve was young, so the memory was blurred. Footsteps came and went, taking things and bringing things. Steve does, however, have a clear memory of seeing his mother in the kitchen with Mrs. Frank across the hallway. It must have been the morning of the funeral because Mrs. Frank had brought her black dress. Steve's mother was both taller and thinner, so it would be short and the waist would have to be pinned, but it worked well enough, and sunlight poured in from the window over the sink. His mother sat at the kitchen table; Mrs. Frank was helping her brush her hair before dressing. 

"You're young. Beautiful," she said, running the brush through the thick, honey-colored hair. "If you send him to one of those homes, you could find someone to take you on. Or -- " -- there was a pause here -- "both of you." 

Steve didn't understand the words, though he came to. 

Lucky for Steve, though: he also remembers his mother's response. He doesn't understand it then, but he comes back to the memory again and again until he does. His mother had been a gentle woman with a soft voice. Soft hair halfway down her back when it was undone. Brown eyes. Steve had never heard her raise her voice or or hand to anyone, but that morning, he saw her tighten her hands into fists hard enough that her knuckles went white. 

"I'll sell myself first," she said. 

"It might come to tha -- " 

They turned and saw him standing in the doorway and abruptly changed the subject. 

*

It didn't come to that. Sarah had been a nurse during the war; she found a position working in a -- Steve, at the time, did not know the term. She used the phrase _hospital for sick people_ , and day before she started, she used the last of the pension money to buy herself a collar, a plain, heavy affair made out of stainless steel. 

Her collar from Steve's father went into the ground with him. 

"I'll hold my hair up," she said. They were in the bedroom, sitting in front of her walnut dressing table with the oval mirror. Old-fashioned, but beautiful. "Steve, put the little lock through the loop in the back. Push until it clicks."

He did; she let her hair down, and Steve came around to look at her from the front. There was a large metal loop in the front, lying just between her collarbones, 

"You look nice." This, Steve had learned, was what was said when someone got a new collar. 

"What matters is that there won't be any questions," she replied, then wrapped her arms around him and held him very, very tightly. 

Despite her position at the _hospital for sick people_ , they had to sell the dressing table, the last of the jewelry, the ivory-backed hair brushes that were his father's collaring present to her. They moved into an apartment with one bedroom and a window over the sink that looked out onto a shaft; then, they moved into an apartment without a separate bedroom, and there was a window over the sink. The walls were thin; the paint was peeling, and the outsides of the windows were grimy. 

Bucky and his mother lived across the hall. 

*

The first time Steve got the shit kicked out of him, he picked himself up, went home, and waited for the nosebleed to stop, then washed as much of the blood as he could off himself. He rinsed his shirt in the sink and hung it on the fire escape to dry, and when Sarah came home, she didn't cry or shout. She saw him sitting on the floor without his shirt on, drawing on the back of a paper bag; she turned the light on, and they sat together at the table. She was still wearing her nurse's uniform, still wearing the stainless steel collar, and she wiped Steve's face off with warm, soapy water and a clean cloth. 

"What happened?" 

"I got knocked down." 

There were lines on her face; it had been a long day and a long ride back on the trolley, followed by a long walk back to their apartment and four flights of stairs. Steve decided she didn't need to hear the reasons they'd been fighting, but sucked in his breath when she started wiping up around the wide, bloody scratch on his forehead from the concrete. 

Steve stayed at the table while she went across the hall to see if they had any hydrogen peroxide; Bucky's mother and her latest man were fighting, so she went to the Greek family at the end of the hall and came back with hydrogen peroxide in a brown chemist's bottle. 

"Do you want to hurt them?" 

"No."

"You should be honest, Steve." He didn't say anything, so she tried a different tack. "Aren't you angry?" 

"I'm angry. It wasn't right, what they did, but I don't want to get them back or knock them down or hurt them, if that's what you're trying to ask." Steve had been thinking about this while waiting for his nose to stop bleeding and had thought it some more while sitting on the floor by himself in the apartment, drawing and listening to people come home from work and smelling them cook dinner and watching as the sun dropped behind the buildings and the sky started to get dark. 

They looked at each other, and as it sank in, Steve watched her expression change, then watched her try to protect him by hiding it. It wasn't quite disappointment, but there had been a hope. 

Life was easier -- the other way. 

"People should do the right thing, Ma. That's all." 

He kissed her on the forehead, gingerly, because his lip was split, then went to start dinner on the hot plate. 

Steve was eleven. Fourteen years later, on the training course, Hodges kicks barbed wire down on Steve. 

*

Hodges is easily six feet tall, fast, strong, good at following rules that have been made clear to her, undeniably the pack leader for a subset of the trainees, and after the rest of the trainees get back from the course, she comes striding out of the shower room, dripping water and completely naked. Steve sits on his bed, quietly working through a topography exercise for their map reading class the next day. Hodges grips his right elbow between two fingers, and when he tries to twist away, she puts her other hand down on his shoulder and holds him, face down on the cot. 

Steve knows better than to cry for help. He can hear voices in the showers; he can hear footsteps and conversations on hold at the other end of the room, where the door from the showers to the barracks is. If anyone were going to say something, they would have said something. If any of them were going to do anything about this, they would have done it already. 

"You little shit," Hodges says, hissing into his ear. The water from her shower drips onto his back. "Showing us all up like that." 

Steve doesn't say anything, so she twists his arm up behind him, higher, tighter, increases the pressure on his elbow. If Hodges is going to take pleasure in hurting him, Steve is willing to give up a whimper or two if it means he can use the rest of his willpower to keep himself from getting an asthma attack. Slow breaths. Steady breaths. 

She takes the hand from his shoulder, but just in case Steve thinks this means he can get up, she twists his arm even higher, even more tightly, painful enough that Steve makes a noise that he knows can be heard by somebody besides Hodges. Hodges laughs. 

"Well?" she asks. 

Steve keeps his mouth shut. He concentrates on steady, regular breathing. This isn't the response that Hodges is looking for, so she pulls his PT pants and underwear down and palms his ass. Her hands are damp from the shower; the nails are cut short, and he can feel the rough part of her palm from loading and unloading trucks. From the stories she likes to tell, at length, at volume, she'd worked in a munitions factory before getting called up for the army. 

Her hand is still on his ass. "Not bad." She squeezes. "Better than what I thought you'd have." 

Steve continues to keep his mouth shut. 

"I got a look at your file -- pretty blonde in the personnel office let me look at it after I asked her real nice, and you know what it says in your file? You're a submissive." Steve tests the grip that she has on his wrist; it's tight, and she squeezes to remind him not to try. "Big blue S next to your name. With a handwritten note that says _special exception_." 

Steve hasn't actually seen his file, but he's guessing that the handwritten note is in Erskine's handwriting, and since Hodges is applying pressure to his wrist to get him to spread his legs, he braces himself for the moment when she decides she really wants to fuck him. From very far away, Steve hears someone say, loudly, _fuck it, I'm getting dressed_. From the corner of his eye, he sees one man, then two women, then a group walk past Steve and Hodges on Steve's bed to get to their stuff. 

Hodges tenses, just a little when they walk by. None of them even look at Steve and Hodges, so she relaxes, and Steve half-hears, half-feels her chuckle. 

"Let's see how many fingers I can get inside you before you start to beg," Hodges says, almost purring. 

Steve spreads his knees as wide as he needs to get her to ease the pressure on his wrist, but otherwise, he doesn't move until she commits all of her weight to the cot to get leverage to fuck him. Once she makes that shift, once the cot creaks and in the quarter-second where the springs give more than Hodges expects they will because she didn't get stuck with the shittiest, oldest cot in the room, Steve knows there is going to be a half of a quarter second where she will be startled into loosening her grip.

When it happens, Steve twists out of her grip. His pants are still pushed down to his knees, but he has learned a thing or two in the week of fighting demonstrations and basic sparring exercises. He braces his forearm by gripping his wrist, and he brings his elbow down directly on Hodges face; she howls and grips her nose. 

It doesn't keep her from beating his face bloody; after dinner, she and two of her closest friends among the trainees corner him. After all, it's been a long time since they've had a chance to play, and Steve fights, but gets cornered by them and put onto his knees, hands bound behind his back with his own belt. 

Erskine points out the broken nose on Hodges, the limp on Graves, the black eye on Smith; Phillips is old-fashioned, so he finds the idea of a submissive with fighting spirit vaguely horrifying, but in the end -- 

In the end, Steve sits alone in the barracks, all the other beds stripped. Erskine comes in with a bottle of schnapps. 

The next morning, Steve is in the car with Agent Carter. 

*

"The past few years," Steve says and trails off. He had been telling her about the alleys and parking lots where he'd been beaten up, and he had said something quiet about how, once you start running, you'll never stop. 

The right side of Steve's face is a bruised mess. He has a black eye; his lip is split in two places. There is a cut on his nose that he doesn't remember getting; there are cuts and scratches on his hands and knuckles, but the collar and tie hide the worst of the hand prints on his throat. 

"It didn't seem like something you'd want?" Peggy supplies, since Steve trailed off. 

"It didn't seem that important," he says and looks directly at her for the first time during the car ride. 

He doesn't ask why a beautiful British girl, dominant or submissive, would go into the American army; she doesn't offer her reasons or mention that Steve was well-liked enough by the other trainees that the reason Hodges's two friends hadn't been holding him down in the barracks before dinner was because they were busy getting into a fistfight with the guy and girl who had the cots to the left and right, respectively, of on either side of Steve's, as well as Steve's partner in map reading class. The drill sergeant broke that fight up, but didn't do a thing to stop Hodges.

Steve's friends were on punishment detail after dinner. Hodges's friends weren't. 

Small steps. Almost invisible steps. 

*

Steve Rogers goes into the injection chamber. Steve Rogers comes out of the injection chamber. 

Abraham Erskine is shot by a HYDRA agent. 

*

Steve Rogers reads speeches from the inside of his shield. Steve Rogers pretends to punch Adolf Hitler in the face. Steve Rogers pretends to lift a motorcycle with a showgirl on it. 

Steve Rogers goes on a tour of America with two dozen USO show girls. Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, a whole week in Chicago, and Steve kisses a whole lot of babies. He gives a lot of press interviews. Bond sales take a 10% jump in every state he visits, and they send him overseas for a USO tour with three show girls and the assistant director and a box of discs of of patriotic songs. On the boat ride over, the smartest of the show girls figures figures out how badly Steve doesn't particularly want anyone offering to help him with his uniform, how much he doesn't want them to offer to rub him down after a show, let alone finding excuses to kneel in front of him. She warns the rest of them off it; Steve spends a lot more time by himself than he's had in a while, and he sketches her as a thank you

In Manchester, she posts it home to her lady back in the States. 

Bristol. Portsmouth. The reception is friendly. In London, a reporter for the Stars and Stripes asks if he has a special sub at home waiting just for him, and Steve has enough experience with reporters at this point to pause and let another reporter jump in with a question. 

They go back to Manchester and board a ship in Manchester for Italy. 

The reception in Italy turns out not to be friendly. 

*

"At least he's got me doing this. Phillips would have had me stuck in a lab." 

"And these are your only two options? Lab rat or dancing monkey?" 

*

"They offered me the chance to go home." 

*

"They want to send me home."

"Do you want to go?" 

They're in the infirmary tent, and Steve is sitting in a chair by Bucky's bed. Bucky stares straight ahead, and Bucky's hands close into fists, and Steve picks his words carefully. 

"You look fit to fight."

"I walked thirty-five miles." 

"You did."

"I walked on a thirty-foot beam over a factory on fire."

"I saw you." 

They both know know why the debriefing unit wants to send him away from the base. Bucky has a clearer idea than Steve as to the details; Steve has a clearer idea than Bucky as to the general picture. 

"So you want to stay?" Steve asks. He doesn't suggest that Bucky might want to stay because of him, because he read the file about what -- 

Bucky looks over. "Wouldn't you?" 

* 

Steve doesn't ask the questions about why after what happened, after how Bucky was used, he's fit to fight. How he was fit to walk thirty-five miles, why he was able to walk thirty feet on a narrow beam over a raging fire when he couldn't stand fifteen minutes before. Why Steve didn't find him, naked and terrified, with the others singled out for _special interrogation_. Why Steve found him in a room with medical testing equipment with a chart of major HYDRA installations affixed to the wall. He knows about what HYDRA did, the example that they made of Bucky in front of others, but Steve has questions about the other elements: there had been a separate apparatus positioned in front of the, one with a different arrangement of straps and restraints and needles and implements that, on thinking about it, Steve is pretty sure were actually electrical prods. 

Steve has his own doubts about whether SSR would actually send Bucky home. 

He didn't say a word to them about the medical apparatus, hoped they'd put the marks down to HYDRA having a little fun, but they have the reports of the others, don't they? They have reports of -- 

*

"He's my -- "

* 

"He's my friend." 

Phillips lifts his eyebrows. 

"We go back. We knew each other in Brooklyn. Put him in the squad, Colonel, and keep him out of your lab rat experiments. Take one more vial of blood from him than you need to clear him from duty, send him in for one more round of interrogation than the rest of the squad gets, and we find out just how much you need me in front of the cameras." 

*

Three days into it, before they've had a chance to head out for a shake-out cruise, Dugan and Bucky get into a fight. Steve doesn't know what it's about; and he doesn't know how it starts, but by the time he hears the noise and wades in and takes a look at the situation, the main thing is dragging Bucky off Dugan before the rest of the Commandos realize just how badly it's going for Dugan. Still, Steve revokes leave for the next month for Dugan, looks around at the circle of Commandos and tells them that they're stuck on base for the same period of time because they stood there and watched. This leaves -- 

The corner of Bucky's mouth is bloody, and he follows Steve without a word. They step into what passes for Steve's office at the SSR base, and Steve shuts the door hard. 

"What happened?"

"You can't guess?" 

"If he was trying -- "

Steve's eyes are hard, and Bucky crosses his arms. "You think he'd still have teeth in his head if he tried that? No, it's the other part of it -- where I'm supposed to fit. Whether I'm just around to fetch and carry." Bucky squares his shoulders for good measure and looks Steve in the face. 

"There's an easy way out of it," Bucky says, and Steve has been propositioned enough times now to recognize when he hears one. 

Even if this isn't the most enthusiastic he's ever heard. 

"No." 

"No? Come on. I saw Phillips put the _special exception_ lettering in with my own eyes. You think they didn't call me in to see that?" Bucky's arms are still crossed over his chest. "It would be better if you'd play grabass with me in public, but I don't think there's much chance of you being willing to do that."

This is the closest they've come to actually talking about -- "Do you actually want me to?"

"Does it matter?" 

Bucky takes a step closer, as if to kiss him; Bucky bends his knees a little, as if he is willing to go down on his knees, but Steve's expression doesn't change. It just gets more -- Bucky recognizes the expression. It was usually the precursor for Steve saying something inappropriate, knowing that he is going to get hauled off into an alleyway for it and yelling all the louder for it, so Bucky lets his breath out, slowly, and straightens up. 

"If you won't, then at least hit me in the face." 

"No. You're on the same punishment as the rest of them." 

"You want your whole squad furious because you won't take me in hand?" 

"You're getting the same punishment as the rest of them. Maybe they'll treat you like a human then."

Bucky considers, it seems a couple things that he could say, but he's still wary of the look on Steve's face. Steve adds, "And if they didn't want to lose privileges, they shouldn't have stood there with their fingers up their -- "

"Do you think giving everyone the same punishment is going to make it better?" 

Bucky looks Steve in the eye, and Steve has the grace to look away, so Bucky pushes the point. "What about when it's somebody outside the Howling Commandos? You going to try to take away their leave, too? Make them scrub the urinals? What if their commanders refuse? What are you going to do then?" 

Steve really can't look him in the eye, so Bucky knows that he has an opening, and he rolls his sleeves up and sticks his wrists out. 

"Everyone thinks it already anyways. You know it's the only reason they let me stay," he says, and Steve doesn't say anything, so it stands as true. 

"Put your hands on me," Bucky adds. "You don't have to do anything else tonight. Just hard enough to leave bruises, and I'll take care of the rest." Steve lets out a breath, but he looks Bucky in the eye and puts one hand around each of Bucky's wrists and squeezes. 

"Tell me when to stop," he says, and Bucky's smile doesn't reach his eyes. 

In the morning, when Morita comes to wake the Captain, he finds Bucky sleeping on the floor next to Steve's cot. Bucky is naked; there are deep, Captain's-hands-sized bruises around his wrists, and when Steve gets out of bed, Bucky kneels by the side of the bed, head bowed. 

For a while, things get better. It helps that Bucky is a crack shot. 

*

For a while, it works if Bucky curls up to Steve's back when they're out in the field, they go off a little ways, and once, they're in the north of Italy again, beautiful day, clear countryside, they're ten miles behind their own lines resting for deployment that night, and they go off a thousand yards into the woods. They find a little clearing, and Steve draws in his little book. Bucky sits up on a rock and smokes and thinks about blue sky and nothing. Before they go back, Bucky musses his hair and rubs dirt into the knees of his trousers. Smears a little on his cheek. 

He bites his lips to make it look like his mouth has been fucked. 

"You should breathe a little hard," he tells Steve, and Steve lifts his eyebrows. 

"Listen, I'm a good lay," Bucky says, and the Commandos hear Steve laughing two hundred yards out. 

*

"Nobody will touch me," Bucky says. 

"Should've thought of that." Steve's voice is completely unconcerned. 

"I walk in with you, and the girls just pat me on the head and give me tips for taking it up the ass," Bucky mutters. "I have never, ever been this desperate. How the fuck did you stand not getting laid?" 

In the next room, the Commandos look over and see Bucky with his beer bottle up to his mouth, and Steve doubled over in his seat with laughter. 

*

"Hey," Jones says, and nudges Falsworth. "Look at them."

Falsworth looks over, and they both see Bucky's face, lit up with surprised delight, and the Captain, genuinely happy, smiling and grinning at Bucky while wiping away tears of laughter from his eyes. 

*

Things get better for a while: Bucky doesn't get into any more fights with Dugan, and he saves Dernier and Jones's lives in the north of France one time by lying up on a ledge and blowing away the brains of the one, two, three, four HYDRA agents that have him pinned down, fast as Bucky can draw the bolt back and get the next bullet out. There are a rough half-dozen of the Commandos, and when the Captain is at a meeting or not there, they're still protection, a buffer of people who know enough to leave him alone, if not quite treat him like a -- 

_I know what you think, but he belongs to the Captain. Yes, that Captain. No collar, but does he need to?_

or

 _I know what you've heard, but I saw him drop a HYDRA commander from five hundred yards, and he sleeps at Cap's feet every night in the field. You want to try either of them?_

Bucky hears the words, or sees it on their faces, and he doesn't like it, but things get better for a while, and then -- 

"Give me your belt," Bucky says and holds out his hand. It's late, but not that late at night, and they're in the SSR base at London. Steve has a private room; everybody else is in barracks. Privileges of rank, in part, but also the requirements of reviewing sensitive mission briefing reports. It also makes pretending easier most of the time, and Steve is sitting at the table. 

Bucky still has his hand out. The door banged open, and Bucky banged it shut again. Steve looks from Bucky's hand up to Bucky's face and doesn't move. 

"What happened?"

"What do you think happened?" Bucky's mouth softens for a second, but the eyes have the same expression as when he came into the room. 

Steve looks back at him. 

"I went for a walk by myself. It didn't go well," Bucky says. "Give me your belt." 

Steve doesn't move. "What are you going to do with it?" 

"What do you think I'm going to do with it?" Bucky looks at him for another second, and Steve doesn't move, so Bucky starts to undo his own belt, and Steve slowly, slowly unbuckles his belt and hands it over. Bucky tests it in his hands, then starts looking around the room for something he can hook it onto. "Won't be perfect, but it'll at least pass -- "

"I'm not letting you --" 

"You're not letting me what?" Bucky takes two strides over to what looks like a load-bearing beam that'll take his weight. 

"I'm not letting hang yourself, so that you can have bruises that make it look like I have you on a choke collar," Steve says, and they're both surprised at how angry, how loud his voice is. "What do you mean, you went for a walk and _it didn't go well_?" 

Bucky look back at him and smiles in a particularly ugly way. 

Steve closes his eyes, then makes himself open them again. "How bad?"

*

"How do I do this?" 

"Use your right hand," Bucky says. "I'll hold onto your left hand for as long as I can. When my grip goes, let up on the belt, wait until I stop coughing, and then start again." 

"When do I stop? 

Bucky pauses for a moment, and from the expression on Bucky's face, Steve has a clear idea of what Bucky would like the answer to be. 

Instead, Bucky says, "When I don't start coughing until after you've counted until ten, or when I don't stop coughing until you've counted to sixty." 

*

"Christ," Dugan says, and half the table looks to where Dugan is staring: Cap is coming into the canteen for breakfast because he eats with the squad, and Bucky is following, head down, uniform collar up. It doesn't hide the mass of bruising around his neck. They stop in front of the stand with the trays; Bucky gets Cap's tray. They stop in front of the utensils. Bucky gets utensils for one. Morita lets his breath out. 

"He went out last night for a walk and got jumped," Morita says and has a sip of his coffee. "He put the other guy in the infirmary."

"The other guy did that to him?" 

Jones snorts. "Bucky broke the first guy's arm and half of his ribs, possibly cracked the other one's head, and was still going at them when the MP's showed up. They were going to lock him up, but somebody told them about -- " 

Dugan breathes out. Bucky is still carrying Cap's tray: in fact, Bucky brings it to the table, puts it down, and then a little slowly, clearly in pain, kneels down by the Captain's seat, head still down. Cap sits down without looking at him, then idly breaks off a corner of his toast and holds it down below the edge of the table: five seconds, ten seconds. It's dry toast, so there are a lot of crumbs. Dugan has a trayful of them himself, but when the Captain's hand is clean, it gleams a little, wet in the middle: Bucky must have licked the crumbs off. 

The Captain wipes hand on a napkin, then gives the Commando's the orders for the day, and his face, the whole time, is hard and set and angry. He looks like he hasn't slept. 

"We don't let him out of our sight unless it's in the field or he's with Cap," Dugan says, quietly, after Steve has gotten up and left the table with Bucky at heel.

Dugan makes eye contact with both Morita and Jones and Falsworth and Dernier in turn, and Morita nods. 

*

"You could get him a collar," Peggy says. "It wouldn't have to be -- " 

"I don't want to put a collar on him." 

Steve rubs his forehead; they're sitting on a bench. The trees are green around them; the ground smells like rain, and Steve is leaning forward. He has his elbows on his knees and his shoulders hunched up: a leftover from the days when he was a much smaller human being, and Steve covers his face with his hands for a moment.

Peggy thinks about reaching over and touching his shoulder, but she can read between the lines. What did Steve Rogers mean when he say when he was beaten up in that alleyway? Behind that diner? 

"God, I don't want to put a collar on anyone," Steve says; his voice sounds muffled, and Peggy thinks, again, about reaching over to comfort Steve, but she holds back. Either way, the moment is over quickly: Steve doesn't have a lot of time for self-pity. He holds absolutely still for a moment, but when he takes his face out of his hands up a moment or two later, his eyes are dry, and his back is straight. 

*

Peggy tilts her head a few degrees, studying the pond and the willows hanging branches down into the water. "I didn't see either of my parents very much. 

"Where are they now?" Steve asks. It's the natural question; her voice is quiet, and her face is softer than he's ever seen it. 

"Does it matter?" Peggy says, regrouping, but also pulling her hand away from his arm. She took her jacket off because the day was warm; she loops it over her arm, and they walk, companionable and comfortable with each other, but Steve makes a note of the fact that she stays at least eighteen inches away. 

* 

Bucky pauses for a moment, and from the expression on Bucky's face, Steve has a clear idea of what Bucky would like the answer to be. 

Instead, Bucky says, "When I don't start coughing until after you've counted until ten, or when I don't stop coughing until you've counted to sixty." 

After the third time, Steve starts counting silently, in his mind, even if that makes it harder: he realizes Bucky is probably reading his lips and forcing himself to cough out after ten, forcing himself stop coughing before _sixty_. 

*

Steve doesn't ask whether Bucky knows how to do this because he's done it to someone, or whether it's been done to him, and Bucky pulls himself into a sitting position. His face is flushed an ugly color, and his throat, Steve suspects, is going to look much, much worse in the morning, but Bucky closes his eyes and leans against the wall. He coughs for a few minutes that feel, to Steve, very, very long, and Steve watches as Bucky starts taking in deep, deep breaths of air. 

Bucky makes himself hold them, then let go. Hold them, then let go. 

"You know what to do tomorrow?" Bucky says, still sitting on the floor, still braced against the wall. His throat sounds raw, and Steve sees Bucky wince when he swallows after the asking the question. 

"I know what to do tomorrow," Steve says. His voice sounds like it comes from very, very far away, and Bucky starts to get up on his knees. Bucky has to lean heavily against the wall to do it, and Steve adds, "Stay down." 

Bucky stops moving. Holds his breath, even. Steve can hear the breath catch, and he hears Bucky take the rest of the breath. 

"Take your clothes off, and sleep on the floor," Steve says. It's what they usually do back at base, but Steve has never actually told Bucky to do it: it just happened to be the easy way to handle whatever this had been until before. "Don't take the bedroll out tonight, and you don't get off your knees until I tell you to." 

Steve strips off his shirt and folds up the shirt and pants and lines his shoes up at the foot of the bed in inspection order. 

The belt stays on the floor. 

Steve turns off the lights, lies down, and closes his eyes. 

*

"It would be better if you'd play grabass with me in public, but I don't think there's much chance of you being willing to do that."

"Do you actually want me to?"

"Does it matter?" 

*

"You could get him a collar," Peggy says. "It wouldn't have to be -- " 

"I don't want to put a collar on him." 

They go back to walking along the edge of the pond, and they talk about Peggy's childhood. They see the willow tree from different directions; there are few other people in the garden, and the day is warm, so on the small footbridge over the narrowest part of the pond, Peggy takes off her jacket. She keeps the tie on; she carries her jacket on her arm, and when the sun catches her arm in the right way, Steve sees, high up on the shoulder, underneath the fabric, the outline of a brand. The scar is raised and looks dark under the fabric of the shirt. 

Why is Peggy's fancy red dress have sleeves to the elbow? Fabric is expensive, rationed; there's a war on, and Steve remembers that Peggy reached out and touched him after he came out of the chamber; he asks her, gently, where her parents are these days.

She tells him it doesn't matter.

Steve looks at her for a moment, but isn't surprised when she pulls her hand from his arm and goes back to carrying her jacket with both hands. 

*

The belt stays on the floor. 

Steve turns off the lights, lies down, and closes his eyes. 

He listens to Bucky sleep soundly through the night. 

*

In the morning, Steve gets up from his cot, washes his face, then dresses, including the belt, then tells Bucky to get off his knees. Bucky washes his face, dresses, and follows Steve to the canteen. He takes the tray; he takes the utensils. He puts the tray on the table, and Steve sits down. Bucky kneels, and Steve has some coffee, eats a little of his breakfast, then breaks off a corner of toast and puts it in the palm of his hand. 

Without looking, he holds it down to Bucky. Bucky eats carefully but quickly, without using his hands and making sure not to let his teeth do more than brush Steve's hand. Afterwards, Bucky's tongue is hot, wet, and thorough. 

Steve wipes his hand on a napkin and goes back to giving assignments for the day. 

Steve -- 

*

Howard Stark flew him out, and he has a new things for Steve. A new uniform, made out of carbon polymer, incredibly light, but nevertheless strong enough to turn aside a few HYDRA knives. A shield made out of a light, strong material. It fits over Steve's hand, and Peggy comes in, hair brushed up and mouth red. Steve asks her what she thinks of the shield, and she picks up a revolver and puts six dents into it. 

Bucky is sitting in a chair by the door. He watches Peggy walk past. He doesn't smile at her, but they do look at each other for a long, long moment. 

*

"I know this neighborhood. I got beat up in that alley and that parking lot. And behind that diner."

*

The belt stays on the floor. 

Steve turns off the lights, lies down, and closes his eyes. 

Bucky sleeps soundly through the night. 

*

They're back in Steve's quarters. There is a window set high in the wall, and it's a sunny afternoon, at least for England. 

"How do you feel?" Steve asks. 

"It's fine," Bucky says and touches his throat, gingerly. His voice is still hoarse. "Looks worse than it feels."

Steve looks down at Bucky. "You can get up off the floor." 

Bucky gets off his knees. The order had been, after all, to use chairs in public except for kneeling at mealtimes: Steve had clarified that in the second meeting they went to, but said nothing about when they were alone. "Where do you want me?" 

Wordlessly, Steve pulls out the chair from the desk for an answer, and Bucky sits down. Steve looks at the vivid marks criss-crossing Bucky's neck; Steve shifted the belt around, didn't make sure to duplicate the position each time. It would hurt for Bucky to tilt his head back, so he doesn't. Would it be appropriate for him to shift around on the chair or turn the chair? 

The afternoon light catches over his face, and Bucky closes his eyes. 

*

The meeting is an hour of logistical wrangling about target priority. Afterwards, Steve asks if he can have a word with Peggy: she considers his face, then says they should go out to a small garden attached to the main house. SSR is quartered on grounds that began in the country when it was built a hundred years before, but London crept around it. There are barracks, there are labs, there are workshops; there is even a short runway for airplanes. There is a pond with a willow tree; there are small paths, and Steve tells Peggy in short, clean sentences what happened the night before with Bucky and the two men he beat bloody, and what happened afterwards. It isn't an apology, but Peggy doesn't need to have it spelled out for her. 

There is a long, long moment of silence. 

"You could get him a collar," Peggy says. "It wouldn't have to be -- " 

"I don't want to put a collar on him. God, I don't want to put a collar on anyone." 

Steve changes the subject; Steve sees the brand high on Peggy's shoulder. Peggy doesn't touch him when they're sitting by the bench, but lets him put his face in his hands, and when they're walking, there is a difficult moment, and Peggy takes her hand away from his arm. Steve doesn't ask why. 

Peggy tells him about happy memories in London. Steve tells her about his mother. 

They walk around the pond until the sun disappears behind the trees. 

Steve lies on his back, stares up at the moonlight on the ceiling, and listens to Bucky sleep. 

*

They go out on a base destruction mission in western France, parachuting in on a moonless night. Bucky splits from the main group the night before: intelligence tells them that every morning, this HYDRA installation has a top-down meeting, and Bucky gets up on the ridge before first light. Four hours later, a shot. Two shots, three, four, five, and there is a long, long moment before Barnes sends up two of Howard's red flares indicating _multiple successful leadership kills_. It's a mouthful for two lines of light, but a moment later, the western half of the camp explodes when Dugan and Falsworth trigger their explosives, and Steve looks over his shoulder to see the flares dropping and dying in the trees. 

"Commander, second in command, head of scientific experimentation for the base, and three others -- secretary, I think, and two scientists," Bucky says later, in debriefing back at the head SSR base, ticking them off on his hands. 

"Efficient," the SSR debriefer murmurs, writing it down. "How did you know about the head of scientific experimentation?"

"Pin on the collar of the white coat," Bucky says and taps where it would be on his chest. "She wore it a little higher than most. It's supposed to be a skull with a star in its mouth. If she'd been head of science for the district, there would have been two bars underneath." A pause, and Bucky looks up at the debriefer, seeing if he's going to ask how Bucky has such very clear knowledge of the small items of HYDRA dress. 

Steve is standing on the other side of the glass, arms crossed over his chest, and when he turns to go, he knows Bucky hears his boots on the floor, knows Bucky is sitting at the table with his ears pricked like a -- 

The marks on Bucky's throat from Steve's belt are mostly faded. 

*

Another night, they're on the supposedly-neutral side of the Pyrenees, and they sleep in a scrub forest. No fires because it's inhabited country. One night on the cold and damp won't kill them, and they eat their rations cold from their packs by moonlight. Steve establishes them near a rock outcropping they can hold if necessary, and he draws lots with the rest of the men for watch duty. It makes him -- not happy, but it eases a tight spot in his heart when he leaves for his watch and Bucky is shivering on a log with Dugan and Morita and Jones and eating field rations. 

After midnight, Steve gets relieved by the next set of sentries and comes back: he finds his stuff shifted, set down in a dryish spot out of the wind, the sleeping bag unrolled and all the rocks underfoot picked out and put in a pile to the side. 

Bucky is asleep next to the rest of the men that drew the pre-dawn watch. 

*

Steve remembers a night when they went to the movies. He can't remember the occasion; it wasn't anything fancy, because he and Bucky were out on the sidewalk. His mother was inside looking for a glove that she thought she'd dropped, but five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes went by, and Bucky looked over at Steve, and Steve looked back at him: they went back inside. It was the last show, and the ushers were picking trash up in the lobby: no, they hadn't seen anyone like Steve's ma. The girl behind the concessions stand looked up from the register. 

"Blonde, blue coat, looking for her glove?" she asked. Her voice sounded calm, but her face was angry. 

Steve nodded. 

"Theater 3. You'll want to go fast," she said, and now her face and voice matched. 

Steve breathed _oh jesus_. 

They broke out into a run. Back in the theater, against the wall near the aisle where they sat: the lights were on, but dim, and Steve's ma was still young. Still a pretty woman. In a position of relative authority of work, and she'd been out with both Bucky and Steve, so she hadn't put her collar on. She had her glove balled up in one fist and was trying to push the manager off her with the other. Her face changed when she saw them -- active fear, rather than something Steve really didn't want to think about, but Bucky already had his right hand balled up into a fist. 

"Hey, asshole," Bucky said. "Lay off. That's my friend's mother." 

"What, you own her or someth -- "

The sentence cut off because Bucky punched him in the face. 

Bucky was fifteen; he hated his father, and maybe the guy reminded Bucky of his father. Maybe? Maybe not. Bucky wasn't particularly big, but he knew how to use his fists and his feet and to take a punch and give it back harder. He beat the man so hard that one of the ushers called the police, and afterwards, Steve and Ma sat at the station to give their statements, explain that the man had the sergeant looked at her identity card, then at her face. "You have your owner's permission to give this statement?" 

*

It's better in the field. It's possible to forget, and when they get back to the SSR base, the month of no-leave is up: sixteen days in the field in twenty-eight days, three HYDRA installations destroyed, five A-grade HYDRA agents neutralized, twenty-two lesser targets turned over to Allied forces. The squad has liberty for Saturday afternoon and night, and after Steve dismisses them, Bucky stays behind, sitting at the table he splits with Morita at the briefing room. There is a map of Europe hanging on the wall behind Steve; afternoon light comes from the windows set high in the walls. 

It's early summer. 

"Should I go with them?" Bucky asks. 

Sixteen days in the field in the past twenty-eight days. "You feel all right doing that?" 

Steve glances through the door; he can hear voices from not very far away, and he realizes that Morita and Dugan and Falsworth are hanging around. "They're waiting for you." 

"They expect me to stay with you, but they don't want you worrying about whether you'll have to beat the shit out of me tomorrow morning," Bucky says, and smiles, and it's -- more gentle, less sharp than Steve expects. 

Sixteen days out of twenty-eight. 

It's better in the field. 

Steve looks at Bucky, smiling like a human; Steve hears Bucky out in the hall telling the Howling Commandos to go into London without him, and Steve thinks: maybe he can do this. 

*

After dinner, Bucky brings a bottle of something without a label. Homemade, black market base hooch, Steve guesses. He has paperwork spread out in front of him, and Bucky puts his hand on the door. After a moment where Steve doesn't say anything, he closes the door. 

Steve gets the stopper off; it makes his eyes water, but he takes a swig. 

"Easy," Bucky says, laughing and clapping Steve on the back while Steve coughs. "It's strong." 

"Are they passing around this in the barracks? Who makes it?" Steve is still coughing a little. 

"You think I'm going to tell you, Captain?" 

Steve surprises himself by laughing. 

The door is closed behind Bucky, and Steve's quarters are small. There's one chair, one desk, one bed. Steve is in the chair; papers are on the desk. Bucky settles down, gingerly, on the bed. 

Bucky brought some back issues of the _Star and Stripes_ with him, and fully clothed, he lies around and reads them. 

After a while, Steve puts on the radio. 

After a while, Bucky strips off his clothes and leaves them on a pile on the floor. 

*

Steve puts the paperwork away inside a drawer, then takes another swig from the bottle and turns the chair around. Bucky gets up off the bed and kneels between Steve's knees. He reaches up for Steve's belt, but Steve pulls back. They consider each other, and Steve can hear trucks outside, voices, maybe even a plane coming in for landing on the short airway strip. 

"You want any more of this?" Steve touches the bottle on the desk. 

"It's mostly for you," Bucky says, and Steve has a vivid image of Bucky buying it on base: all those labs. Glass, a window onto the lawn, Bucky turning over a couple bucks. More for a glass bottle with a proper screw top. Someone had to have a still set up somewhere, maybe using fruit left over from the canteen. At his apartment he was living in when the recruitment center took him, Steve had some neighbors who could make it out of potatoes; this doesn't taste as clean as what they made. 

Steve takes a swig, and he doesn't cough this time. Bucky watches him do it. 

"What did HYDRA do to you?"

Bucky smiles a little. "Maybe I've always been this way." 

It's a lie, isn't it? 

Steve puts a little of the moonshine into his palm, cupping it, and holds it down to Bucky. The stuff has enough alcohol that the part splashed on his fingers feels cool, and when Bucky tilts his head back and opens his mouth, Steve tips his palm up and pours it into Bucky's mouth. Bucky sucks the rest off Steve's fingers: Steve remembered the tongue on his palm had been hot and wet and thorough, but Bucky's mouth is even hotter and wetter and very, very thorough. He keeps his eyes on Steve; Steve watches in return, and when he pulls his fingers out of Bucky's mouth, there's an audible pop. 

The radio is playing an evening dance hour, and Steve slides the chair back a few feet. 

"Hands on the desk," he says to Bucky, and Steve undoes his belt. 

*

"Theater 3. You'll want to go fast," the girl behind the concession stand said. 

*

"My husband is dead," she said. "Mustard gas."

*

"How many do you want?" Steve has his belt doubled up in his hands, and he stands behind Bucky. The radio is still playing the evening dance hour. 

"I don't think that's a question for me to answer." 

Steve touches the belt to Bucky's back, and Bucky's hips jump. 

"How many do you want?" Steve repeats the question, the belt still against Bucky's back, and Bucky presses his hips to the desk to keep them from moving again. It's only partially successful.

"As many as you can give me," Bucky says, finally. His voice sounds -- terrible, and he grips the edge of the desk even harder. White-knuckled and then some. 

"You get a dozen. Count them, and tell me where to put each one." 

Bucky asks for two on each side of his ass, then three on the back of his left thigh, and another three on his right thigh. Bucky is trying to keep from shouting, and Steve asks, in a voice he doesn't recognize, "Where do you want the last two?" 

"On the inside of my thighs," Bucky says, and he is breathing heavily. Steve can see Bucky's shoulders heaving. 

"Turn around, and lie down on the desk." 

Bucky makes a noise when he turns over onto his ass, and another when Steve pulls him so that his ass hangs off the desk. 

"Keep your legs open," Steve says, and Bucky closes his eyes and does. "You get one on each thigh." 

* 

"You have your owner's permission to give this statement?" 

"My husband is dead," she said. "Mustard gas."

The sergeant's face looked hard for another moment, then softened. "Which division?"

"The 107th in France. His lungs were never the same." She reached over and took Steve's hand. "This is his son." 

"Who's the one in lock-up? Bit young to be your second husband."

Steve remembers bristling, and he remembers, too, how cold her hand felt on his. "I never remarried," she said, and the tone of her voice made Steve look up from her hand to her face. Soft. Pleading. Completely differently from cold, cold hand holding Steve's so hard he thought his fingers might crack. "James is fifteen and tends to do rash things -- he lives across the hallway, and Steve and James are friends. James just doesn't think sometimes." 

"I was in the 79th," the sergeant says, finally. "I got a taste of mustard at Messines. Nasty stuff." 

In the end, the sergeant decides to let everyone go home. In light of how young Bucky was, in light of how it's he-said, she-said, it would just make more paperwork: the manager agrees, and Steve's ma jumps at the offer before Bucky can get a word. She tells him he's very kind. Smiles at him. 

Steve's last memory of that night involves watching his mother look at Bucky's bruised knuckles under a streetlight, then dab at the blood on his mouth with her folded-up gloves. Steve was a few steps back; he didn't hear what his mother said, but he remembers Bucky with his head tilted back, trying not to cry, because in the end, he was fifteen and he would have beaten a man most of the way to death if Steve's mother hadn't pulled him off. 

Steve -- 

*

Steve remembers the alleyway, remembers seeing Bucky in his new uniform and expecting Steve to be proud of him for being in the 107th. Steve remembers Bucky taking him to the Stark Expo; Steve remembers Bucky's arm around his date for the night, and Steve remembers arguing with Bucky in front of the recruitment center. 

Steve makes himself look at Bucky on the desk with a hardon from getting a dozen with Steve's belt. 

"Finish yourself off, then get dressed and go," Steve says and sits down, heavily, on the chair. 

The radio finishes with the dance hour and moves onto the news bulletin. 

*

The next time out, Bucky breaks a HYDRA charge by picking off seven HYDRA field soldiers and two officers. 

*

The time after that, they're in a pine forest in the southwest of Austria, and Bucky saves Dugan's life. The Commandos are retreating up the side of a hill; Dugan gets separated by a quirk of terrain, and Bucky shifts position to lay down covering fire for Dugan, but Dugan goes down. The terrain is rocky, and Dugan badly twisted ankle, does something worse to his knee. The other Commandos are too far away. He drags himself under a bush and lies on his back, sweating, listening to HYDRA get closer. He counts how many bullets he has left in his revolver. 

"Did you get hit?" 

Dugan isn't sure what words he manages through the pain, but Bucky pushes the vegetation back and loops an arm under Dugan's shoulder, helps him up, supports him with his shoulder. 

Together, with Bucky half-carrying Dugan, they scramble the last two hundred yards eastwards on the long, long slope, so that the rest of the Commandos can cover them. 

*

They're still in the pine forest, but on the other side of the border in Allied territory, back at field camp, and Dugan is sitting on the ground, pale and sweating while the medic checks his hideously swollen ankle and knee. 

"Look, somebody's getting a reward for saving your life," Jones says, and Dugan looks over and catches his breath: twenty feet, thirty feet away, down at the edge of base, they can see the blue of the Captain's uniform and the darker blue of Bucky's jacket. Bucky is on his knees; the Captain is standing in front of him and he has something in his hands that he breaks pieces off and feeds them Bucky. When he doesn't have any more pieces, Bucky licks the Captain's palm and pulls the Captain's fingers into his mouth all the way up to where the fingers meet his palm. 

Bucky seems to ask the Captain something, and the Captain says something short and quick in return, then wipes his hands and fingers on Bucky's cheek and walks away without turning around. 

"How do things look, Doc?" the Captain says, sitting down on the ground next to Dugan's stretched out leg. 

Bucky shows up a minute or two later, cheeks red, mouth stained with chocolate, still visibly hard. 

*

Bucky does -- Bucky shoots a HYDRA agent sneaking up on Steve. 

*

Steve has the door half-open, and Bucky knocks.

*  
The Commandos have been in the field sixty-two days in the field out of the past ninety. Steve requested, and received, permission to give the squad a full weekend's worth of liberty. Steve also has the door half-open. 

Bucky knocks and steps inside. 

Steve looks up, briefly. "I'm catching up on paperwork," Steve says, and Bucky closes the door. He crosses the room and sits down on the bed. 

"I'll wait," Bucky says. 

Steve considers him for a few seconds, and Bucky stretches out on the bed: eventually, Steve goes back to his paperwork. Eventually, he hears Bucky undressing himself. He undoes his belt, shucks off his shirt, and unzips his pants. When the sounds stop, Steve looks over his shoulder: Bucky is sitting naked on his bed. It's late afternoon on Friday, and a patch of sunlight catches Bucky on the right shoulder. 

"Off the bed," Steve says, and Bucky slides off the bed and onto his knees. 

Quick. Eager. Steve is still dressed from his meeting with Philips, shoes, dress shirt, though his jacket is unbuttoned, and he uses the toe of his shoes to nudge Bucky over to the foot bed, where there is a little more space. It's a narrow room, longer than it is wide. Steve undoes his belt and takes it off while watching Bucky's shoulders and back; Bucky catches his breath when he fears Steve unbuckle the belt. He lets it out again when he hears Steve pull it through the belt loops. 

"Elbows up and behind you." Bucky does it, but not quite high enough or tightly together enough, so Steve loops his belt around Bucky's arms, just above the elbow, and draws them up and together. Bucky shifts a little, adjusting to the strain, and Steve waits until Bucky stops shifting to wrap the belt around Bucky's arms, then buckles tightly. 

Steve lets Bucky shift again, balance himself more on his knees than before, and it's a small room, and Steve is now a big man, so he doesn't have to move far. 

He picks the bottle of moonshine that Bucky left with him the last time: after the liquor was gone, Steve rinsed it out and used it for water. He'd poured himself a glass before sitting down to do his reports, but there are still two, two and half inches left in the bottom -- not much, but enough to give the glass bottle weight, and the bottle was heavy to begin with. 

"Open," Steve says. 

Bucky opens his mouth and tilts his head back, just a little, and Steve slides the neck of the bottle in, deep as it'll go. It's narrow at the mouth, but widens, and then Steve brings Bucky's head forward, so that the water won't run back and choke Bucky, so that Bucky will have to hold it in place with his jaw. 

He goes back to his paperwork. 

The alarm clock says it's two minutes past four. 

*

Bucky makes a noise in his throat. Steve glances up at the clock. Eight minutes. 

He crosses a _t_ , and turns the page. 

*

Steve takes his jacket off and hangs it on the back of his chair. Bucky makes another noise in his throat, and Steve looks over. Bucky's mouth and chin are bright with spit; the bottle is making him drool, and his breath is starting to come a little short. 

Twelve minutes. 

Steve goes back to his report. He's up to the morning before the last HYDRA installation they destroyed. 

* 

Bucky makes a loud noise; Steve isn't sure what kind of name goes with it, but he turns to look over his shoulder. He sees that Bucky's jaw got tired enough that he let the bottle slide forward, halfway out of his mouth. Bucky must have made the noise when he realized that it was slipping, and Steve watches Bucky 

Steve looks at the clock. Eighteen minutes. 

*

Twenty-five minutes, and Bucky is trying to breathe deeply through his nose and mostly failing. There is sweat on his back; his chin and mouth and chest are shining with a mix of sweat and spit. 

*

At twenty-nine minutes, Bucky drops the bottle. 

It shatters on the concrete floor, and Steve looks up from his report and over. Bucky looks back at him, mouth hanging open, eyes half-closed. There is broken glass around Bucky's knees, and still plenty of light in the room from the windows to pick out the edges. 

"You should stay still," Steve says. 

Bucky lets out a noise that might be a moan, might be a sob, might be any number of things, and Steve goes back to his report. 

*

At five, Steve puts the cap on the fountain pen, puts the report back in the folder and slides it into the drawer of his desk and locks it. He puts the key on the desk, and the glass crunches under his feet as he comes to stand next to Bucky. He pulls Bucky onto his feet by pulling up with one hand under the belt -- after an hour with his arms pinned behind him, Bucky howls, but knows better than to try to stand on his own with the glass around his feet. Steve puts Bucky face-down on the bed, then undoes the belt holding Bucky's elbows together. 

Steve folds it in half and takes hold of the buckle end. Blood is rushing back into Bucky's arms below the elbow, and he is struggling to make his fingers work again and get feeling back into his arms. He makes noises that part of Steve's mind recognizes as moans; there are other noises that the same part of Steve's mind knows are gasps when he manages to close his left hand into a fist. 

Bucky arches upwards when Steve touches the belt to the small of his back. 

"You can have one for every minute you kept the bottle in your mouth," Steve says. "Spread your legs. When you've had enough, tell me to stop." 

*

Sitting by the side of the pond at SSR's base -- 

*

After Bucky leaves -- 

*

"You get one for every minute you kept the bottle in your mouth," Steve says. "Spread your legs. When you've had enough, tell me to stop." 

Bucky lets his breath out in a rattle, but doesn't say anything: Bucky takes all twenty-nine on his back and legs and ass, counts them out in a voice that starts out a little unsteady, moves through to hoarseness, moves to taking a deep breath before counting out the number, moves to -- 

Afterwards, Steve stands by the side of the bed, panting. Bucky doesn't move for ten, fifteen, twenty seconds, maybe a full half minute or more, and then he rolls over, slowly, carefully, gingerly. He makes a noise in the back of his throat and drops his head back, face tight with pain. It hurts for him to prop himself up on his elbows; it hurts for him to lie on his back. Some of the welts wrap around the back of his thighs, and Bucky struggles up into a sitting position, careful not to let the back of his thighs touch the back of his legs. There is some blood; Steve tried not to put welts on top of welts, but didn't have much room towards the end. 

Bucky leans forward. Opens his mouth. Brings it -- 

It isn't a big room. 

"No." Steve pushes Bucky's head back. 

"You're hard." Bucky is short of breath, possibly from pain, and his eyes are bright. Also, possibly, from the pain. 

Also, possibly from something else. 

"Put your clothes on, and get out," Steve says, taking a step back, putting the belt on the desk, and after Bucky is dressed and gone down the hall, Steve throws up, noisily, in the trash can. 

*

Steve remembers summers in Brooklyn. Halfway through the summer, the city stopped cooling off at night, and people sleep on rooftops or down by the water, in the parks, trying to catch a breeze. Steve remembers a night when he was seventeen, three or four months after Steve's mother died. Steve had to give up the apartment. He couldn't keep it, but he had worked for the green grocer while his mother was alive. The family liked Steve, so after his mother died, they kept him on while he tried to finish school. The husband let Steve sleep in the back room at night; the wife fed Steve dinner more nights than not, and Steve remembers one night when sweeping up the shop. Bucky knocked on the glass; Steve opened the door, broom in hand. 

"Dad's back," Bucky said, head tilted back a little. 

"You can't sleep here, not after what you pulled with Rena." 

Bucky put his hands in his pockets and did not look like he was even thinking about apologizing for that, so Steve looked at him for another moment, judging just how upset Bucky was that his mother had -- 

Steve exhaled, leaned against the frame of the door. 

"Let me finish sweeping, and I'll tell Mrs. Katramandos. You want to try sleeping in the park?" 

*

"We grew up on the streets together," Bucky says, putting his arm around his date and winking at her friend. "Like brothers." 

After he throws up into the trash can, Steve leans his head against the edge of the desk. He closes his eyes. 

*

When he opens his eyes, it's dark outside, and Peggy has just turned on the lights in his quarters. 

"You're late," she says, looks down and sees the broken glass on the floor, so she steps carefully over it,and touches him on the shoulder. "Come on, let's get your mouth rinsed out." 

*

Afterwards, sitting by the side of the pond at SSR's base, with the moonlight on the water, Steve tells Peggy about growing up Brooklyn. He tells her about walking up and down Madison Avenue in '36, trying to get an ad agency to look at his portfolio. She asks to see his current sketchbook -- _is it all dancing monkeys_ , she asks, and he doesn't laugh, just turns his head away and looks down at the grass. 

Peggy saw the glass on the floor, saw the color of Steve's face. It would have been hard not to smell the vomit, and she's pretty sure that the t-shirt underneath the bed was -- 

*

"If you hadn't gone into that factory camp, where would he be?" Peggy says, and Steve exhales in response. 

"I know." 

After a long silence, Peggy asks about the Stork Club. Howard keeps suggesting, with the most innocent face, that they should go the next time they happen to be in New York. 

*

Steve remembers the last night he spent mostly on his knees: they'd used his belt to tie his hands at the wrists. Different belt, different clothes, different circumstances, but even lying with his head against the desk and the contents of his stomach in the trash can already, thinking about it enough to make his stomach heave. Hodges and two of her friends cornered him, and Steve remembers trying to stay calm enough to breathe through the pain -- his asthma had gotten better with age, but it was still the worst-case disaster for a bad situation. 

Two fingers touched on the side of his face; Steve felt his face being turned upwards. His vision was blurry beyond roughly an elbow-length away. Concussion? 

Someone, not Hodges, asked, "Now, Rogers, you going to behave? Or are you going to bite?" 

Steve bit. 

He remembers what came afterwards, and sitting by the pond under moonlight, Steve pulls his hand away from Peggy's. She doesn't take it the wrong way, though, because she -- 

They walk around the grounds, talking a little and listening to the wind in the trees. The moon is out on the grass; the moon is out on the airfield, and they watch a fighter plane come down out of the sky, first as four red lights, then as four red lights and a noise, then as four red lights and an almost unbearably loud noise, and then just as four red lights again as the propellers spin down. The ground crew runs out toward it; the pilot climbs out. 

Steve offers Peggy his arm again. She pauses, considers both the arm and Steve's face, and then touches him with her hand, just above the wrist. 

*  
Steve asks if he can have a picture of her. She doesn't have a real photograph on hand, but gives him a newspaper clipping. 

*

Bucky's dad comes back, and Bucky's mother takes him in for however long it lasts: Steve's mother is dead, and Steve has been sleeping on a cot in the back room of a grocery and knowing that he is lucky to have it. It's the middle of 1935; the days are hot. The nights stay hot. There are, for obvious reasons, no openable windows in the back room of the grocery where the safe is, and the family usually sleeps up on the roof on nights as hot as this one is going to be, so Steve finishes sweeping, hangs up his apron and goes upstairs to tell Mrs. Katramandos that he is going out for the night with a friend. They're going to find someplace to sleep where it's cool. He'll be back in the morning to help Mr. Katramandos open up the shop. 

"You want something to take with you?" she says, but is already cutting off a thick slice of homemade cheese for him and a thicker slice of bread for him. She puts it in the bottom of a cut-off flour sack, then thinks about it and cuts another slice of bread. Same slice as the family eats, Steve knows. Same cheese as the family eats. He has a place at the table; he wears hand-me-downs from a cousin, same as the other kids in the family. The stove is off in the kitchen, but it's still warm, still hot. The sun is most of the way behind the buildings, but heat rises, and there a line of sweat on her forehead. The windows are open, but there isn't much of a breeze. 

"Take a peach or two from the bins downstairs," she adds. 

"Yes, ma'm," Steve says. 

She pauses, studying him with her hands still on the flour sack. "He's no good. You remember when we caught him hanging out the back, throwing rocks up at Rena's window to get her to go out with him? Even while you were seeing him. What other proof do you want?" 

The floor boards are thin; Bucky is waiting at the back stairs. He can probably hear every word. 

"It's not like that with us," Steve says, and from her face, she doesn't believe this, just like she didn't believe it the first two dozen times he said it, because -- well. She knows, though, that if there is a choice between staying friends with Bucky and keeping his job, keeping a roof over his head, keeping food in his stomach, he'll take Bucky. Every time. Mrs. Katramandos is a practical woman, and she's known Steve since he came up to her knee. 

So she leans over, hands him the flour sack 

"At least he'll keep you safe," she says. "Even if he'll never make an honest -- " she says a word in Greek; Steve can guess what it means -- "out of you, at least he keeps you safe." 

Steve doesn't have anything to say that, so she kisses him again on the forehead, like he might actually be a family member, and Steve goes downstairs, gets two peaches from the bin and puts one in each pants pocket: Bucky has two dimes on him. It's enough for them to ride the subway down to Coney Island, split the bread and cheese and peaches, then rinse their hands in a public fountain and walk up and down the main strip, watching people. They sit in one of the of the drugstores, order a soda each, and make it last. They watch more people. 

Once all the lights in the stores go out, they sleep in the sand under the boardwalk in their jackets. 

Over the years, they've slept rough on Coney Island more than a couple times. 

*

"We grew up on the streets together," Bucky says. "Like brothers. You believe we're the same age?" 

*

They go on a mission to the HYDRA base that is west of the Maginot line, and Bucky finds a sheaf of papers that lets Allied cryptographers crack HYDRA encrypted transmissions. Steve brings the compass with Peggy's picture at the top; when they get back to base, Steve's door is half-open. 

*

Steve's door is half-open. 

Bucky knocks, steps through, and closes it behind him. He lies down on the bed. Steve is working, and after a while, Bucky strips his clothes off and puts them on the floor. 

*

Steve finishes the sentence he is writing, and he gets out of the chair; Bucky starts to slide onto his knees on the floor, but Steve puts his hand on Bucky's bare shoulder, hesitates for a second, and then kisses him, slow and careful. Bucky lets himself be kissed. Steve puts his hand on Bucky's hip, then Bucky's ass, and Bucky lets him. Bucky even tilts his head back, and Steve kisses his throat. 

"Give me a second," Steve says and starts to unbutton his jacket. Bucky leans forward to help, but Steve pulls back, and Bucky settles against the bed. 

Steve takes off his jacket and hangs it on the back of the chair. Steve takes off his dress shirt and folds it. Steve sits down on the bed, pulls off his shoes and lines them up at the foot of the bed, puts his socks in his shoes. He takes off his belt, puts it on the desk out of easy reach, then pulls off his undershirt and underwear. 

"Come on," Bucky says. 

The cot creaks heavily when Steve slides carefully onto it and starts kissing Bucky again. 

Eventually, Bucky says, "Let's try the floor. We don't both fit on here." 

So they kiss for a while on the floor, Steve's bare ass on the floor and Bucky lying on top of him: Steve has broader shoulders. Steve has bigger arms. He puts his hand in the small of Bucky's back, strokes Bucky's ass. Bucky moans and spreads his legs, and Steve realizes -- Bucky came prepared. Ready. Steve guesses it's Vaseline, easiest thing to get around base, and has a sudden mental image of Bucky fingerfucking himself on a bunk in the barracks after all the other Commandos headed into town. Sunlight on his shoulders, naked on the sheets on the spot that Bucky has by the door, two fingers, three fingers. Steve gets hard so fast that it makes him a little dizzy. Bucky feels it and kisses Steve with more intensity, and Steve keeps his hand pressed against Bucky's ass. 

For a few moments, things move quickly. Bucky rocks back against his fingers; Steve puts in a second finger, then a third. Bucky moves into a half-kneeling position, and he rocks back on Steve's fingers, past the point he'd fucked himself. Three fingers wide, down to the second knuckle, then past the second knuckle, and all the way down to the palm. 

Bucky braces his arm against the cot; Steve fucks him from behind, and afterwards, Bucky pulls his clothes on and leaves without a word. 

Steve sits down on the cot, leans against the wall, and watches the afternoon light fade. 

*

"-- the Cyclone at Coney Island?" 

*

In a bombed-out pub, Peggy tells Steve the story of her brands: she was twenty-two. She thought it was love, and maybe it had been: formal collaring, ceremony in church, registered in government books. Was Carter the last name she had been born with? No, she gave hers up willingly, and she took the brands willingly, too: the brand at the left shoulder matched one on her right hip. They had been his favorite places to hold her when she was on her hands and knees and he was fucking her. It was the most romantic thing she could think of to give him, and maybe it had been love, but whatever else it was -- 

The last night they were together, she told him that she wanted to continue at the Ministry, and he hit her until she fell, held her down by the shoulder and hip and cuffed her and put her on a spread bar, then fucked her while she screamed and screamed. She had been crying afterwards on the floor, still cuffed, still on the bar; he left her there and turned out the lights, saying that he was going to his club and that he'd put a brand on her face when he came back in the morning. 

The housekeeper took pity on her and called her mother; her mother came and cut Peggy out of the cuffs, then went still with shock when Peggy said that she was leaving him. 

"I don't think they've forgiven me yet," Peggy says. 

"Does he still own you?" Steve asks.

"On the books, yes," Peggy says and looks down the length of the space at the broken furniture and glass. The moon is high and bright and full in the sky: a bomber's moon. 

"In reality?"

Peggy smiles a little. "I'm a very good shot." 

*

"I wouldn't count on the best of protection. The last guy you killed was Captain Rogers's submissive, so I wouldn't count on the best of protection." 

*

Steve doesn't think he can get drunk, but Peggy tells him that she intends to: is he going to do the gentlemanly thing and at least try to keep her company? Peggy is quiet when drunk, and when they finish the bottle between the two of them, Steve bends his arm and holds it out to her. She tucks her hand against his arm, and solemnly, once the blackout is over, they walk through the streets together. 

Peggy has a revolver in her pocket; Steve has the strength in his arms, his shoulders, his legs. 

A week later, they're on the back of a car streaking towards a HYDRA plane. Phillips is driving, and Steve had wanted to kiss Peggy in front of the doors: she told him to go after Red Skull, but on the back of the car, she closes her eyes when Steve leans forward, so he kisses her. It surprises Steve how hard she kisses him back. 

*

Steve remembers sleeping in the sand on Coney Island. 

*

Steve remembers -- 

*

"I still don't know how to dance." 

"I'll show you how. Just be there. I'll wear a dress without sleeves." 

Her voice catches on the word _without_. Steve has the compass set in front of him, and the horizon tilts towards him, full and white. 

*

Steve remembers that he bit, and they beat him. He remembers refusing to open his mouth after the beating; he was doubled over on the ground in pain, openly sobbing because he was in too much pain to hide it, and hands were still belted together behind his back. They had a choice between continuing to beat him and getting what they wanted, so Hodges knelt behind him. Even kneeling, she was taller than him, and her shoulders were broader. She put one hand over his collar bones to hold him still and against her, then used the other to pinch his nose closed, so that he had to choose between suffocating or opening his -- 

Actually, there had been blood in his mouth, blood running down his throat, so it was really choice between choking to death and opening his mouth. Her friends had tossed a coin for who would get to go first. As long as he had one of their dicks in his mouth and didn't bite, she kept her hand off of his face, let him breathe. 

*

Steve points the nose of the airplane towards the ice: if he jumps and hits the Arctic water, how long will he last? Seven minutes? Ten? The serum would help him survive longer, but there are no Allied ships within four hours of the area. If he jumps and hits the pack ice, would he survive the fall, even if he had a parachute? Assuming he survived the landing, what would he do? Wander the pack ice until he starved to death or drowned or died of exposure? 

Minimal chance of rescue. No chance of -- 

*

Steve has a year's worth of memories of Peggy. 

*

As the plane goes into the water, Steve has a thought that feels like a memory: he is on the beach at Coney Island in September, when the visitors are gone on the weekdays, but the weather isn't quite cold. The wind is blowing steadily from the sea, and Peggy is wearing a red dress that shows her arms, and she is barefoot. Steve is barefoot, too, wearing his service uniform, but without the shoes or the socks and the trousers rolled up above his ankles. The sand feels wet and cool against his feet. 

"You're telling me this is the Stork Club," she shouts, loud enough to be heard over the wind, because he is still walking towards her. The boardwalk is behind his left shoulder, and somehow, he knows he has two dimes from Bucky in his right pocket. 

"You calling me a liar?" Steve shouts back at her, smiling, and with another two steps, he is standing in front of her. Peggy laughs and holds her hand out to him. 

"Something slow," she says, and he realizes, for the first time, that this is his old body, the one before the serum. Therefore, he is shorter than Peggy, but they still dance; seagulls call overhead, and the waves on the shore are, in fact, slow. Steve lets her lead. When he looks at Peggy's shoulder, he sees the brand is oddly fuzzy, and when he searches his memory for signs of pain or fear, he finds none. He can taste blood in his mouth and down his throat, but the beach, the sea are the only things have ever existed; him and Peggy are the only people who have ever lived. 

At the end of the song, all Steve has to do is steady himself, take a deep breath, and walk into the sea alone. Even in his old body, it doesn't seem so hard, does it? 

In the end, it only takes a moment for the ice to close over everything.

**Author's Note:**

> So yeah, if any of you ever asked the question _what does Rhod Chang's deep animal underbrain look like?_ , the answer is, apparently, _15,000+ words of non-con/dubcon with BDSM lashings and enough angst to drown a seven-nation army_
> 
> Kink-consulting hat-tips go to [House of Ares](http://archiveofourown.org/users/House_of_Ares) and [marmolita](http://archiveofourown.org/users/marmolita), and double thanks to [marmolita](http://archiveofourown.org/users/marmolita) and [sinope](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sinope%22) for cheerleading/cookie giving/enspammening. 
> 
> And yes, I know, there is a lot of ignoring the complicated, very personal question of just how immutable topping/bottoming is. Let's not even talk about switching, and imma not even pretend (i) to take a position on it, and (ii) that I have the writing skills to elide over that question. Uh, can we pretend that in this version of American society in the 1940s, it's viewed as immutable in largely the way that sex and gender presentation were previously viewed in American society as immutable/change at your mortal soul's peril. This fic also hilariously ignores actual sexual mores of the 1940s to a degree that is truly lol-inducing, I know. Also, gender/sexual bias issues. 
> 
> Also, no, I don't think that all D/s is inherently abusive or weird or icky on consent issues. Nor do I think D/s in the real world looks anything, anything like this fic. I just. Just see the comment about id fic.
> 
> The non-shitty parts of this owe a clear structural and thematic debt to helenish's [Take Clothes Off As Directed](http://helenish.talkoncorners.net/asdirected.html).


End file.
